Browsing tag archives: Wall Street

More news from the burgeoning police state. (With thanks to the good people at BoingBoing for their coverage.)

The chancellor of the University of California at Davis called on police to remove peaceful protestors – students, faculty, a former poet laureate of the United States – from the campus. The police gleefully did their work with their batons and all the pepper spray they could muster.

Nathan Brown, an assistant professor in the Department of English at UC Davis, has written to the chancellor demanding that she resign. It’s a powerful letter that I’m sure will have no effect on the chancellor’s stunted conscience, but it may well prove to be be a springboard toward her removal. (Update: Here’s the chancellor’s response, to wit: I’m so sorry this terrible thing happened, but it’s their fault for breaking the rules.)

Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, a Washington, DC, lobbying firm sent a memo to one of its clients, the American Banking Association, outlining a plan to discredit the Occupy Movement. The memo clearly demonstrates that the 1% is terrified of Occupy’s political power, which is a pretty impressive admission since the movement is constantly pummeled for “not having a clear agenda.” Story and video here, PDF of the memo here.

And New York’s billionaire mayor, not content with evicting the protestors from the park where they had set up shop, had the OWS library destroyed in the process. I hardly need to add my own outrage here for my fellow word lovers.

The 1% is fighting back with egregious force, and they will continue to do so. Historically, this marks the beginning of the downfall of the dictators. Even those who disagree with the Occupy Movement cannot possibly (I hope) approve of the Nazi-style tactics being used on peaceful citizens. Of course, I could be wrong, and then the Constitution is just words on paper.

“Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.”
– Rod Serling, “The Obsolete Man,” The Twilight Zone

The official unemployment number came out Friday: 9.1 percent. That’s 14 million Americans without work. Not counted are the underemployed who can’t make ends meet or the people labeled as discouraged workers, more than 200,000 unemployed people who have tried so hard and for so long to find a job that they’ve given up, at least for now. The Congressional Budget Office does not expect the unemployment rate to fall below 8 percent for two more years and says we won’t see 5 percent unemployment until 2017. Further, mass layoffs – when 50 or more workers lose their livelihoods at once – rose 3 percent in August.